By
Cory Spiller
On Monday, the mail did not come because our nation was celebrating Columbus Day. You may not have noticed, you may not care. However, a heated national debate continues year to year over the relevancy of Columbus Day. Columbus was a jerk, to put it lightly. To put it heavily, he was a blood-thirsty pirate, but a damn good one. He was ruthless by today's standards, but for a 15th-century European he was fairly average. The present debate should be concerned as much with Columbus' actions and character, as with what he represents as a national figure. Columbus is not a national hero; he is a hero of western civilization's legacy of conquest, murder and slavery.
As children, most of us were taught that he discovered America. We were also taught to square dance, but that's an entirely different issue. In one sense he did discover the continent: he discovered America for western civilization. But in another sense we were, and children still are, educated as racists. How can the American educational system say, with a straight face, that Columbus discovered America, if Native Americans had been living here for tens of thousands of years? To do so would require an individual to think of Native Americans as sub-human, and to believe that their accomplishments were worthless compared to those of 15th century Europe.
Saturday, in Denver, 147 Native American activists were arrested for protesting the Columbus Day parade. They poured a line of fake blood across the parade route to represent their ancestors' blood. Parade participants were forced to walk through the symbolic blood of Native Americans, as the Europeans did in their conquest of America. It was a poignant and moving form of protest. The intentional and unintentional genocide of Native Americans began with Columbus. Historians believe that nearly 80 percent of Native Americans died of diseases within the first 100 years of contact with Europeans. To quote Randy Newman: "Columbus sailed for India, found Salvador instead, shook hands with some Indians, soon they all were dead. They got TB and Typhoid and Athletes-Foot, Diphtheria and the Flu, excuse me great nations coming through."
Columbus accidentally discovered America; he wasn't hoping to find new land, and he had nothing in common with our founding fathers. He needed to fill the coffers of the Spanish Crown that financed his voyage. He had two things on his mind: gold and slaves. Howard Zinn writes that gold was hard to come by, however Columbus forced the natives to bring him back what little they could find, after which they "were given copper tokens to wear around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death." When hope for gold was lost, Columbus had to find some commodity to send back to Spain, and so hundreds of slaves were rounded up and sent back. Although nearly half would die on the journey, Columbus believed that the slave trade must continue; in his own words: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." Most of us can still remember the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, but the slave trade was oddly left out of our elementary curriculum.
Interestingly this year, Columbus Day fell on the same date as Yom Kippur, the most holy Jewish day - as holy to Judaism as Christmas and Easter are to Christianity. Yom Kippur is not a national holiday - the mail does not stop. We were taught that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but for most of us Yom Kippur was never mentioned in school, as Judaism is not a standard of our western Christian civilization.
Monday also saw the beginning of Native American Cultural Week on campus. Again, the mail did not stop for them. They performed while the nation celebrated a man who represents everything they had too suffer.
America has a nasty habit of looking to the past for heroes and symbols of pride; and too often it nips us in the bud. Columbus is a false hero, and when we teach his story to our children we continue a cycle of ignorance and bigotry. Uncle Sam must clean the blood from under his finger nails. Stop the mail for Yom Kippur; stop the mail for Native American Awareness, but let is bow our heads in shame on Columbus Day.
